Personality types and traits

Question 1

Whats personality?

Answer 1

Dynamic organization, insidethe person, or psychophysical systems that create a person’s characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings”
(Carver & Scheier, 2000, p.5)

•“An individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behaviour, together with the psychological mechanisms – hidden or not – behind those patterns”
(Funder, 1997, pp. 1-2.

Question 2

What did Mischel (1968) / Funder (2001) find?

Answer 2

Traits account for 10% of variation in people’s behaviour.

Funder (2001) revised this to 16%

Question 3

But what traits might predict instead?

Answer 3

BUT traits may predict “general” rather than “specific” behaviour and over long rather than short timescales. There may be consistency between the moment to moment states we experience over time

Question 4

Problems with personality tests?

Answer 4

Usually based on self-report questionnaires
Assumes:
-We can accurately report our behaviour
-We have an unbiased view of our personality
-The “view from inside” should be primary
-We want to tell people the truth

Based on the assumption that every aspect of an individual’s personality can be described by existing words like “outgoing,”
Examples: Allport and Odbert (1936), Cattell et al (1970), Costa and McCrae (1985, 199

Question 5

What have personality theorists and clinicians long argued?

Answer 5

Personality theorists and clinicians have long argued that our own ratings of our personality may be inaccurate, due to e.g. social desirability or lack of insight

In particular, it is argued that personality traits marked by “internal” events such as anxiety may be prone to greater disagreement between self-report and observer-report.

•Recent meta-analyses suggest that these effects may be present to some extent, but may actually be relatively small (Kim et al, 2019)